The Soul #1 - Who Needs It?

What is the function of the soul in this world?

Any rational discussion of the soul must begin by examining the soul's function rather than its nature. The belief that people have souls is inextricably tied to the existence of a Creator. As far as I know, no one has yet come forward and said that the soul evolved from lower species. If we have souls, then God clearly created us.

In a world that simply evolved, we have no reason to search for the purpose of life forms. Life exists not for a purpose, but merely because it managed to fight its way out of the primeval slime. But if we posit the existence of an Intelligent Creator, we must also assume that everything in creation has a purpose. The problem of purpose is the first difficulty we must face when we start thinking about the soul.

Function without awareness?

We human beings are not conscious of our souls in the way we are conscious of our bodies. The reason that there is a heated controversy over whether human beings have a soul at all is due to the fact that no one has ever seen or met a soul. No one can point to their soul as they can to their body and declare, "You see, or feel, there it is!" No doubt the soul can exist even if we are unconscious of it, but it is legitimate to ask, of what use is a soul that you are not conscious of? What can it do for you? What is its purpose?

Perhaps the believers among you will protest, "The purpose of the soul is obvious! The body is mortal. When we die it returns to the dust. We need to have souls so that we can survive death. After we die, it is our souls that enter Gan Eden, the World to Come; our bodies rot in the earth."

But is this really a satisfactory answer? How can a faculty of which you are entirely unconscious in life possibly represent you in death? Your soul plays no obvious part in your earthly life. There is something profoundly unsatisfying in basing your eternal existence on this totally unknown part of yourself. Isn't the whole idea of reward based on the survival of what we call the self? In what sense is your soul really you? How could it have your memories, share your relationships, and have your personality when it didn't participate in your conscious life at all and simply lay there dormant? It would seem that your identity disappears when you die even if your soul survives.

To sum up the difficulty: The soul is the only part of us that survives death; our eternity is experienced through our souls. Yet our souls do not seem to have any relationship with our personality, as they are not part of our living consciousness.

As is often the case in Torah study, properly stating the question takes you at least half way to the answer. Jewish tradition teaches that this lack of consciousness about our souls is precisely the reason that God needed to give us the Torah! Because we have no direct experience of our souls, there is no way for us to practically discover the soul's needs -- what sorts of activities make the soul sickly and weak, the inputs it requires to be healthy and strong, what sort of things will injure it or even destroy parts of it.

The soul's instruction manual

The Torah was given to teach us how to conduct our lives properly and wisely as souls, rather than bodies.

In short, the Torah was given to teach us how to conduct our lives properly and wisely as souls, rather than bodies. When it comes to our bodies, we are able to discover all the phenomena that pertain to physical well being through experimentation and experience. Most people know an enormous amount about the things that affect their bodies without having to glean this information from books or learn it in school. The knowledge of our bodies feels like a natural part of our consciousness.

The Supreme Designer, who is aware of our limitations, and knows that we cannot possibly learn the ways of the soul through our earthly experience, was forced to inform us about our souls in a book. He was forced to give us the Torah to instruct us how to behave as spiritual beings.

But how can we comprehend the application of the physical states of health and sickness to the soul, which is a spiritual entity?

Rewards and punishments -- pleasure and pain

The Torah is based on the idea of free will and the consequences of reward and punishment that attach to freely chosen actions. It is the soul that survives death, not the body. The body dies and disintegrates, and it cannot serve as the recipient of reward or punishment. [We shall see in future lessons that this is only partially true, but we need a lot more information before we can appreciate why not.] Consequently, as the Torah teaches that reward and punishment are what life after death is all about, it has to be the soul that will be rewarded and punished. If so, the soul must be capable of experiencing pleasure and pain.

Physical pain and pleasure are always related to states of the body; vigor and health produce sensations of pleasure, whereas sickness and injury are accompanied by pain. In the same way, spiritual pain and pleasure must be related to the well being or sickness of the soul. The soul that is vigorous and healthy will experience spiritual pleasure, while the soul that is ill or injured will experience spiritual pain. If the afterlife is about reward and punishment as the Torah claims, and it is the soul that will be rewarded and/or punished, the quality of one's after life turns out to depend on the state of health of one's soul.

Health + positive stimulation = pleasure

Following this line of thought to its logical conclusion leads us to a remarkable insight. Spiritual pleasure and pain operate under the same principles as physical pleasure and pain. In order for the body to experience pleasure it must be healthy, but you also need to supply it with external stimulation. To feel good or to feel pain, the body must undergo a sensory experience. This is true of the soul as well, except that we have to substitute spiritual experience for physical.

Many people imagine that life after death involves moving to a different world where we will be given a choice piece of real estate in return for our good deeds in this life. This concept of reward is based on a property model. The soul will be given things that are the spiritual equivalents of worldly wealth. But this cannot be all there is to the next world.

Wealth in our world is sought after because money can always be exchanged for pleasure-related experiences. Even the success and prestige of having money is related to the ability to translate the money into pleasure experiences. Money that cannot be exchanged for anything is an entirely worthless commodity. Wealth in the next world cannot be very different. If it cannot be exchanged for pleasurable spiritual experience, it won't do us much good.

Our souls are very much an integral part of our lives here in this world.

The mystery surrounding the role that our souls occupy in our lives is beginning to clear. Indeed, we need our souls in order to survive death. But our souls are not just foreign bodies that play no role in our earthly existence. Our souls are very much an integral part of our lives here in this world. If we dedicate ourselves to observing the 613 commandments of the Torah, which the Supreme Designer has defined as requirements for spiritual health, we will have invested a considerable amount of our life force into our souls. In fact we will have lived our earthly lives as if we were souls rather than bodies.

Affecting our souls

Our souls reflect the work we have put into them in the same manner as our bodies. They are definitely not the same at our deaths as they were at birth. They are either full of spiritual health and vigor, positively radiant from the enormous spiritual light cast by our good deeds, or they are sickly and injured, their light dimmed by the spiritual darkness generated by our transgressions.

Change in the spiritual state of our souls is constant throughout our lives, just as the physical state of our bodies is constantly changing. Spiritual experiences affect and alter our souls, just as physical experience changes our bodies. We are unconscious of the spiritual changes that take place within us while we are alive, because our physical bodies were designed to shelter us from sensitivity to the spiritual impact of our actions. This insensitivity to spiritual change was programmed into us to preserve our free will.

The World to Come

When we leave our bodies, we re-experience everything we have done in our lives, this time around spiritually, as souls. The quality of our eternity is very much a direct result of the alterations we ourselves have produced in our souls. Our entire eternity consists of experiencing what we have done spiritually instead of physically. There is no question that our sense of identity is fully retained. After all, we are only re-experiencing our own choices.

Life after death consists of nothing more than reliving our earthly experiences spiritually.

Rabbi Chaim of Voloz'hin (in his work Nefesh Hachaim, Gate 1,12) explains that this is the meaning of the Mishna in Pirke Avot (Ch.4,2) "the reward for a mitzvah is the mitzvah itself, whereas the punishment of a transgression is the transgression itself." Life after death consists of nothing more than reliving our earthly experiences spiritually. If we have devoted ourselves to doing mitzvoth, we will experience the spiritual joy generated by our mitzvoth throughout eternity, whereas the pain of our transgressions will envelop us in a spiritual Hell full of pain and misery, the spiritual effects of our transgressions.

The Mishna (Sanhedrin 10,1) says all Jews have a portion to the World to Come, instead of in the World to Come. In Hebrew the word 'In' conveys the idea of being located within a place. Had the Mishna used 'In', this would imply that the World to Come is an actual place where all Jews will be transported after death. 'To' is used because the Mishna wants to teach us that we should regard the World To Come as a transformation of where we already are. We are already in the right place, so we had better get busy and turn it into a decent habitat for eternity. The World to Come is nothing more than the world we are in, except that it is experienced spiritually.

The spiritual aspects of Torah penalties

The Torah is a book that instructs us how to live as souls rather than bodies. Not only are its commandments to be viewed in this light, the consequences of transgressions recorded in the Torah should also be understood in a spiritual sense. Remember that we have no idea what can hurt or injure the soul. Tradition teaches that the Torah is attempting to convey the impact of our worldly deeds on the health and integrity of our souls through its list of penalties.

This helps to explain the Torah's inclusion of capital punishment for certain transgressions -- which can be difficult for the modern mind to relate to. If you do an act the Torah describes as a capital offence, you inflict a fatal illness on your soul. When a part of your soul dies, this means that there are aspects of spiritual experience that your soul will never be able to enjoy. The fatal spiritual illness caused by your transgression destroyed the spiritual sensitivity of a part of your soul. Without such sensitivity the taste of the spiritual experiences offered by the World to Come bring mental anguish in place of the intense joy experienced by healthy souls. Through the Torah's punishments, the Torah is attempting to point out the spiritual dangers of existence, just as we do our best to teach our children to avoid what is physically harmful and dangerous.

Fitting into reality

We must learn how to fit into spiritual reality just as we learn to fit into physical reality. In fact, fitting into spiritual reality is even more important as that is the reality in which we will spend our eternity. The Torah provides us with crucial information about our spiritual vulnerabilities.

The answer to our original question is now clear. Our souls play an enormous part in our physical lives even though we are not conscious of them. They experience everything that we experience. We can work directly on changing them, improving them, just as we change and improve our bodies.

Now that we have explained the point of having souls we must explain how our souls operate. For example, how can physical actions have an effect on spiritual entities? The subject of the next essay will concern the nature of the soul and attempt to answer these questions.

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About the Author

While studying at the famed yeshivas of Chaim Berlin, Lakewood and the Mir in Jerusalem, Rabbi Noson Weisz also received a degree in Microbiology from the University of Toronto, MA in Political Science at the New School for Social Research and his LLB from the University of Toronto. Rabbi Weisz is currently a senior lecturer at Yeshiva Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem.

The opinions expressed in the comment section are the personal views of the commenters. Comments are moderated, so please keep it civil.

Visitor Comments: 8

(8)
Javier,
October 29, 2013 1:09 AM

...

Doesn't the Torah say that we are our souls? I ask because it sounds like you believe the soul is separate from the conscious being.

(7)
Yehudith Shraga,
July 15, 2012 1:15 PM

Exactly to the point

Thank you,Rav Noson Weisz, for the delight of reading your article, most wonderful explanation in simple but very clear terms, there are some details of course which are very generalazed, but it is a nessecary generalazation to come to the point of how to become conscious of what is absolutly unconscious for us-our soul, and the role of Torah and Motzvot in this process, highly recommended for basic understanding of the structure of the reality and its connection with spirituality, thank you again for the efforts to make complicated concepts so clear, refreshing and helping.For those intrested in more detailed explanation of the way of getting conscious of our soul the Introductions to the book of Zohar, to the book of Talmud Esser HaSeffirot and Ptikha leHokhmat haKabbalah=the introduction to the Wisdom of Kabbalah by Baal haSulam are recommended,use Rav Mordechai Gottlieb's edition to get reliable texts ,these introductions are translated into English by Yedidah Cohen with Rav M.Gottlieb's aprouvel, but original texts in Hebrew are most valid.One point must be stressed out which is so perfectly explained in the article of Rav Noson Weisz, that the language of our soul is Torah study and performing Mitzvot and, it is a way to revealing the consealed part of ours-our soul, and those who try to reveal it without performing Mitzvot and studing Torah may only make a serious damage to it.Special attention should be payed to the words of Rav that Torah uses the languauge of this world to explain spiritual notions and the correlation of these terms should be properly understood, because Torah is the code of each and every soul and so should be properly learned to be used within the earthly life time for the correction and enreachment of each individual soul, but the efforts are worth, because it becomes your compass in the ocean of our external and internal reality and our input in the collective strive of Jewish people to bring the Devine Presence to this world.

(6)
Katerina Katapodi,
November 27, 2007 8:48 PM

Comments

There are various characterizations for the consistency of soul..One is consciousness of what we feel of course, what we do and we say..It consists in feelings we have towards others and mainly our intentions which dictate our actions..Mind and soul are interelated, which means one is controlled by the other.Our soul is the vehicle that is united to Gods intentions for Universe and mainly to his Volonty for humans according their actions..It's our judge for what we do to others, as well as the way of communicating with them. It dictates awareness for laws of life and reasons for our existence.

Vakasa-Yours Katerina

(5)
Laura,
April 29, 2006 12:00 AM

capital offense

This does not help me understand capital offense. We need time to heal the soul from damages by embracing and walking out Torah and death seems to rob us of the healing time.

(4)
audrey,
August 6, 2002 12:00 AM

DISAGREE

There was a statement made that "when a part of your soul dies, there are aspects of your spiritual experiences that your soul will NEVER be able to enjoy". This is totally false. You will be able to enjoy these aspects if you are able to take your soul back to that place it was in before it was damaged/hurt. However, this spiritual healing of a certain part of your soul might take years to accomplish.

This has happened to me, and I have overcome years of a soul that was destroyed. I have now become the person I was before with enough confidence, trust and love in my life and I will never let my soul be destroyed again in that same aspect it was in the past. However, the experience DEFINITELY changed the way I look at things in my life as to what is important and not, and as to WHO I AM. My soul is ME. Not my body.

(3)
margie Hazell,
May 13, 2002 12:00 AM

great site, just found it today

been looking for 70 years,

(2)
Anonymous,
March 31, 2002 12:00 AM

one must accept that one's soul is integrated

If it isn't theconcept of personal reward or suffering is unreal

(1)
anthony levy,
March 27, 2002 12:00 AM

stuff aristotle

this is an aristotelian exposition of soul, in the sense that we are asked to consider the issue rationally. the only way to access soul is to drop the veil of rationality and begin to connect with it via direct cognition - da'as in hebrew, and gnosis in the greek. in the first stage this will only be the realm of nefesh - feelings and thoughts, corresponding to the non-physical layers of asiyah. however, if we sort out nefesh by clearing our emotional blockages, thus becoming a 'ba'al nefesh', we have an open heart with which to move on to the next layer, which is direct experiential connection to the mizvos and the light of torah (orah zu torah) itself, accessed via neshama. the problem with a western cultural background is that the map of reality has been so distorted that it becomes almost impossible to grasp the map of Chazal.

I've been striving to get more into spirituality. But it seems that every time I make some progress, I find myself slipping right back to where I started. I'm getting discouraged and feel like a failure. Can you help?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Spiritual slumps are a natural part of spiritual growth. There is a cycle that people go through when at times they feel closer to God and at times more distant. In the words of the Kabbalists, it is "two steps forward and one step back." So although you feel you are slipping, know that this is a natural process. The main thing is to look at your overall progress (over months or years) and be able to see how far you've come!

This is actually God's ingenious way of motivating us further. The sages compare this to teaching a baby how to walk. When the parent is holding on, the baby shrieks with delight and is under the illusion that he knows how to walk. Yet suddenly, when the parent lets go, the child panics, wobbles and may even fall.

At such times when we feel spiritually "down," that is often because God is letting go, giving us the great gift of independence. In some ways, these are the times when we can actually grow the most. For if we can move ourselves just a little bit forward, we truly acquire a level of sanctity that is ours forever.

Here is a practical tool to help pull you out of the doldrums. The Sefer HaChinuch speaks about a great principle in spiritual growth: "The external awakens the internal." This means that although we may not experience immediate feelings of closeness to God, eventually, by continuing to conduct ourselves in such a manner, this physical behavior will have an impact on our spiritual selves and will help us succeed. (A similar idea is discussed by psychologists who say: "Smile and you will feel happy.")

That is the power of Torah commandments. Even if we may not feel like giving charity or praying at this particular moment, by having a "mitzvah" obligation to do so, we are in a framework to become inspired. At that point we can infuse that act of charity or prayer with all the meaning and lift it can provide. But if we'd wait until being inspired, we might be waiting a very long time.

May the Almighty bless you with the clarity to see your progress, and may you do so with joy.

In 1940, a boatload 1,600 Jewish immigrants fleeing Hitler's ovens was denied entry into the port of Haifa; the British deported them to the island of Mauritius. At the time, the British had acceded to Arab demands and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The urgent plight of European Jewry generated an "illegal" immigration movement, but the British were vigilant in denying entry. Some ships, such as the Struma, sunk and their hundreds of passengers killed.

If you seize too much, you are left with nothing. If you take less, you may retain it (Rosh Hashanah 4b).

Sometimes our appetites are insatiable; more accurately, we act as though they were insatiable. The Midrash states that a person may never be satisfied. "If he has one hundred, he wants two hundred. If he gets two hundred, he wants four hundred" (Koheles Rabbah 1:34). How often have we seen people whose insatiable desire for material wealth resulted in their losing everything, much like the gambler whose constant urge to win results in total loss.

People's bodies are finite, and their actual needs are limited. The endless pursuit for more wealth than they can use is nothing more than an elusive belief that they can live forever (Psalms 49:10).

The one part of us which is indeed infinite is our neshamah (soul), which, being of Divine origin, can crave and achieve infinity and eternity, and such craving is characteristic of spiritual growth.

How strange that we tend to give the body much more than it can possibly handle, and the neshamah so much less than it needs!